When I read the DBW article yesterday entitled "7 Must-Consider Strategies for Ebook Pricing," I ended up scratching my head. What happened to "listen to the consumer and what they consistently tell you they want?" That sounds like a good idea when considering pricing e-books. Apparently not. It started with strategy #1. "Charge extra for convenience." Here's the quote: Though ebooks cost less to print, ship, and stock than paper books, they’re much more convenient for readers. So why not charge extra for that convenience? With this strategy, the price of an ebook would be higher than its equivalent in paper—isn’t immediate...

I’m a little late, but I wanted to bring up just one story that popped up between the times I was at The Digital Reader and here. I’ve been following the saga of RoyaltyShare founder Bob Kohn at length with some interest and more than a little amusement. (That's Kohn in the photo to the right.)  Though he doesn’t necessary have a direct stake in the case’s outcome, Kohn has nonetheless been filing verbose comments, legal motions, and even a comic book (as a legal motion) in an attempt to head off the Department of Justice’s proposed agency pricing settlement....

On Felicity Wood’s blog, Julia Crouch writes a guest post about her experiences writing on trains, using it in part as a metaphor for the e-book experience, and partly to discuss a publicity project she did in which she wrote a complete short story over the course of her train journey to and from a writers’ convention. The story, Strangeness On A Train, has been published as a free eBook on Amazon and Apple, as well as being printed up into samplers to be handed out on the Harrogate train and at the Harrogate Crime Writing...

On the Columbia Journalism Review, Ryan Chittum has a rebuttal to a number of recent posts about e-book production costs and price, including the post by Mathew Ingram that I covered here. Though the article is replete with quotes and counter-arguments, but the central thrust seems to be that publishers ought to be able to charge what they want to—but they really should be wanting to charge less. At base, copyright holders have the right to ask what they want to get for their work (which is why they were so concerned about Amazon selling ebooks...

Caroline Vanderlip, CEO of SharedBook, has an opinion piece on Inside Higher Ed stating that “going digital” is not a panacea that will automatically bring about lower prices for textbooks. Much as publishers of mass market fiction have been saying, if the costs of producing the material remain the same, the price of the textbook will stay about the same whether the distribution method is digital or electronic. And OER (open educational resources” material will not necessarily change this either, at least for a while—there just isn’t very much of it yet. Vanderlip writes that the best way of...

It’s no secret that one of the justifications behind publishers keeping e-book prices high is that they cost almost as much as paper books cost to publish, so they have to sell them at high prices in order to make a profit. But Mathew Ingram has an insightful post on GigaOm in which he points out that the crucial point in e-book pricing is not what the books cost to make, but what consumers are wiling to pay. Ingram points out that consumers probably do underestimate what it costs to make a book, noting that publishers do “have a...

Picked up from a tweet by @jwikert, here is an innovative pricing model being used by Microsoft for its new ebook Programming Windows: “Programming legend Charles Petzold is rewriting his classic Programming Windows—one of the most popular programming books of all time—to show developers how to use existing skills and tools to build Windows 8 apps,” a post to the Microsoft Press blog reads. “To celebrate, Microsoft Press will release three versions of the eBook, as both the book and Windows 8 evolve. When you purchase the Programming Windows, Sixth Edition eBook, you will receive the current version of the eBook plus all subsequent...

The Wall Street Journal has some further news on the putative e-book pricing settlement in the US Justice Department and European Commission joint anti-trust investigation of the “Agency Five” publishers plus Apple. Anonymous sources have told the Journal that three publishers are inclined to settle and two others (plus Apple) are holding out. HarperCollins, Hachette, and Simon & Schuster reportedly favor settling, while Penguin and Macmillan (plus Apple) do not. (Random House, who waited a year to implement agency pricing, was not part of the investigation.) "The companies involved know very well under which conditions we...

CBC News reports that some Nova Scotia libraries have begun boycotting Random House over a change to Random House’s e-book pricing for libraries. Earlier this year, Random House announced its plans to raise the prices on e-books bought for library loans, and despite an ALA statement asking the publisher not to do so, put it into effect last month. Under the new rates, libraries have seen Random House e-book prices almost triple. Troy Myers, CEO and chief librarian of Nova Scotia’s South Shore Public Libraries, said that he hopes the boycott will make a statement, and that publishers should...

The DOJ’s threat to sue the publishers over agency pricing has evoked a number of responses and reactions. Mike Shatzkin has written a thoughtful survey of what a putative “end” of agency pricing might mean for all the players in the e-book industry, and for the major and minor publishers. Basically, all the other e-book vendors will be put in the position of having to burn cash to keep up with Amazon’s discounts or see their sales drop off, it may mean that Google’s bookstore e-book initiative can’t compete, and the publishers will be back in the same...

A reminder today that, if you self-publish with Amazon, you’re not guaranteed to be in control of your e-book pricing. Fantasy author Jim C. Hines recounts a recent pricing snafu with his e-book Goblin Tales, self-published through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo. Hines had put the book on sale for 99 cents over Christmas and returned it to $2.99 in January (though apparently Kobo was slow to respond to Hines’s pricing change, meaning that his book was at 99 cents for a few weeks longer than he intended thanks to Amazon’s price-matching algorithm). Then on February 11th Hines...

I reported on a story last April in which the algorithms of two used-book-listing bots resulted in a $23.7 million used textbook. Now here are a pair of recent stories about it happening again—in both directions. First of all, Carlos Bueno wrote a self-published children’s book called Lauren Ipsum, about understanding how computers work. He priced it at $14.95 on Amazon—then he discovered a pair of third-party-vendor bots listing the book at around the $55 mark. These bots would, presumably, place an order from Amazon for the $15 book as soon as someone ordered the $55 one, then sell...